Mr. Obama isn’t compromising with Republicans—he is a Republican

it's getting harder and harder to witness the charade that is the 2012 election season... the ugly lie of government of the people by the people makes it really difficult to give a shit...

rob urie in counterpunch...

Mr. Obama selected the members of his deficit
commission with a particular outcome in mind—to cut the social programs
long derided by the right as ‘entitlements’ while maintaining tax cuts
for the rich and pushing more of the same neo-liberal reforms that led
to the current bifurcated economy. To be clear, with this commission Mr.
Obama was not defending against the wing-nut economics of the radical
right, he was straightforwardly promoting them.

To assure the outcome that he wanted he loaded his commission with
deficit-hawk Democrats and Republicans. Even so, the commission couldn’t
 come to consensus and the required votes for ratifying its
recommendations weren’t found. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama continued to push
 the most onerous of these recommendations as if consensus had been
found in subsequent negotiations with congressional Republicans.


This tale, generally known to folks who are paying attention to
politics and economics, is retold in response to the ongoing pleas from
liberals, progressives and New York Times columnists that Mr. Obama stop
compromising with Republicans on economic issues. Clearly from his
actions, Mr. Obama isn’t compromising with Republicans—he is a
Republican. And Mr. Obama has demonstrated time and again that he isn’t a
defender against the predations of our economic elite; he is an active
proponent of them. How much more evidence is needed for this to be
clear?

[...]

As is the case in American presidential politics, the
choice is never between ‘good’ candidates. It is always a contest in
lesser-evilism. But at least Mitt Romney is straightforward about whose
interests he represents. Despite the use of seemingly different
rhetoric, Mr. Romney and Barack Obama serve the same masters. Those
putting forward the pretense that there is a great difference between
them are not paying attention to Mr. Obama’s record. Sure Mitt Romney
would be a disaster. Barack Obama already is a disaster. What we need is
a revolution, not more delusion that either candidate would serve our
interests.

maybe succumbing to helplessness and hopelessness is precisely the strategy... people who believe that nothing is ever going to change tend not to be troublemakers...
meanwhile, the barrage of requests for donations to candidates and causes is approaching a fever pitch...

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Ecuador's radical approach - actually collect taxes, tax the rich, make the oil companies pay for extracting its natural resource

what a concept...!

from the real news network...

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How do we overthrow neoliberalism - we first admit that we don't know what we're doing

naomi klein offers what, imho, is some of the most solid wisdom i've yet heard on the magnitude of what we are facing... the part referenced in the post title starts at approximately 22:15...

Naomi Klein - interview with Occupy Vancouver from Ian MacKenzie on Vimeo.

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Cornel West on Obama: I was completely wrong

chris hedges quoting obama campaign worker and princeton university professor cornel west on west's serious disillusionment and 180-degree u-turn after obama was elected...

“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.”

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there."

"I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

and, if the above isn't a sad enough indictment, here's what west says obama COULD be doing but has chosen not to...

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says.

like west, i thought i was voting for a man who would do what, in west's dream, obama would be doing right now... but no... the nightmare of untrammeled greed, led by those whose only imperatives are money and power and gaining more of same through the endless pursuit of endless war and corporate thievery, continues unabated...

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The US government itself and its regulatory agencies ... are being privatized as the "final stage" of neoliberal economic doctrine

we're headed there with the speed of a bullet train...

The Plan to Steal Everything and Sell the People into Slavery
Wisconsin Death Trip


[...]

Economics textbooks, along with Fox News and shout radio commentators, spread the myth that fortunes are gained productively by investing in capital equipment and employing labor to produce goods and services that people want to buy. This may be how economies prosper, but it is not how fortunes are most easily made. One need only to turn to the 19th-century novelists such as Balzac to be reminded that behind every family fortune lies a great theft, often long-forgotten or even undiscovered.

But who is one to steal from? Most wealth in history has been acquired either by armed conquest of the land, or by political insider dealing, such as the great US railroad land giveaways of the mid 19th century. The great American fortunes have been founded by prying land, public enterprises and monopoly rights from the public domain, because that's where the assets are to take.

Throughout history the world's most successful economies have been those that have kept this kind of primitive accumulation in check. The US economy today is faltering largely because its past barriers against rent-seeking are being breached.

Nowhere is this more disturbingly on display than in Wisconsin. Today, Milwaukee – Wisconsin's largest city, and once the richest in America – is ranked among the four poorest large cities in the United States. Wisconsin is just the most recent case in this great heist. The US government itself and its regulatory agencies effectively are being privatized as the "final stage" of neoliberal economic doctrine.

and it must be stopped...

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Henry Giroux, among others, characterizes what's happening as an outpouring of student protest

yes, but that's not all it is...

Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy

Within the last few months, we have seen an outpouring of student protests from all over the globe.

[...]

Counterpublic spheres and modes of resistance that we once did not think young people could mount have erupted in a rush of emotional and political expressions and scattered demonstrations. Mass demonstrations have been organized through the emergent screen cultures of a generation well versed in new technologically assisted forms of social networking and political exchange.

[...]

Signaling a generational crisis that is global in scope, young people have sent a message to the world that they refuse to live any longer under repressive political regimes sustained by a morally bankrupt neoliberal world.

while there's a tremendous number of youth involved in the protests (which is very welcome and long overdue), i think there's also a significant number of my own baby-boomer generation who are equally energized, and many of us have either taken to the streets right along with the young - or would if we weren't tied up in other circumstances... being on a work assignment in southern africa at the moment doesn't offer much of an opportunity to get involved but, believe me, this is one thing i would put my body on the street for in a heartbeat...

i was speaking with my daughter in the twin cities last evening and she's been considering making the trip to madison and, if she does, my heart will be with her... i've been waiting for this kind of tectonic shift all of my life and i won't be relegated to the dustbin of the "elders"...

as a case in point, here's a 60-something who isn't sitting there watching "law and order" re-runs...

Anna Becker looks tired. Becker is leaning against the brick wall beside the entrance to Bank of America's Pearl District branch in Portland, Oregon, where one of over 50 nationwide protests by US Uncut has been underway for nearly two hours.

But Becker, a retired teacher, is just as energized as the protesters at the front of the crowd of about 60, who spill into the street and draw long, loud honks from the stream of cars driving toward the Willamette River.

"I have been waiting for 20 years for something like this to happen in America," says Becker. The words she has spoken in private for years are now plastered onto the canary yellow poster board she holds up like a shield: "B of A is al-Qaeda: financial terrorists."

Bank of America (BofA) is the first corporation to be targeted by US Uncut, the transatlantic offspring of the United Kingdom-based anti-austerity group UK Uncut, which held its first demonstration to protest corporate tax evasion in late 2010.

As a voice at the megaphone of the Portland protest said, "The United States does not have a deficit problem. The United States has a revenue problem." According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office, 25 percent of the biggest corporations pay no federal income tax. BofA, the recipient of $45 billion in bailout funds, shuttles its would-be tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens. Meanwhile, budget deficits are cited as justification for pay freezes for public workers and cuts to heating assistance programs, Social Security, and other social safety nets.

good stuff, people... keep on wakin' up...!

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Our kleptocratic rulers know exactly what they are doing

i've said all along, there's nothing incompetent or unintentional about what's happening...

ismael hossein-zadeh in counterpunch via alternet...

[T]he kleptocratic rulers in the US, EU, and other debt-burdened countries know exactly what they are doing: to let the recession drag on, to take advantage of the crushing recession in order to extract “enough” concessions from the working people until welfare states are dismantled and labor costs in the more developed capitalist countries are made competitive with those of the less-developed countries. This explains why despite new signs of further global economic contraction, the reigning governments in these countries (whether they are nominally headed by Socialist, Social-Democratic, Labor, Democratic, Conservative or other parties) are maintaining their coordinated abstention from expansive or stimulating fiscal policies while continuing their brutal spending cuts on health, education, wages, pensions, and the like.

This is not to say that these governments do not want to have economic growth or job-creation—they do—but that they want them on their own (Neoliberal) terms, that is, through Neoliberal policies that would create jobs that would pay wages on a par with those of workers in less-developed countries. In other words, they prefer the kind of lopsided economic growth whose fruits would be reaped mostly by the wealthy—the so-called trickle-down or supply-side economic growth. As writer/reporter Patrick O’Connor points out, “In the US, Europe and other advanced capitalist economies, the aim is permanently reducing the living standards of working people.

It is not surprising then that, instead of calling for bold expansionary policies of growth promotion and job creation, US and European government heads, their economic policy makers and the collusive corporate media are frequently calling for “tolerance” and “endurance” in the face of economic hardship, exhorting the unemployed and economically distressed that they “need to be patient” because, as President Obama has occasionally put it, “the road to economic recovery does not follow a straight line,” and that “it's going to take some time to fix it." (The President made this statement on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." Mr. Stephanopoulos obligingly spared the President the obvious question: “why is it, Mr. President, that fixing the enormously expensive problem of Wall Street gamblers did not take much time, but reviving the economy and creating jobs, which would take only a fraction of the cost of the Wall Street bailout, would take a long time?”)

yes, mr. president... why IS it...?

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Was Argentina's 2001 economic collapse a preview of what's happening now worldwide?

this link takes you to a 12-part youtube video series on the 2001 economic collapse in argentina... living there, i of course had heard many of these stories but watching these clips brought it home to me in a way nothing else ever has...

i highly recommend watching these if for nothing else as a backgrounder to what's now taking place world-wide with potentially the same ramifications...

A documentary on the events that led to the economic collapse of Argentina in 2001 which wiped out the middle class and raised the level of poverty to 57.5%. Central to the collapse was the implementation of neo-liberal policies which enabled the swindle of billions of dollars by foreign banks and corporations. Many of Argentina's assets and resources were shamefully plundered. Its financial system was even used for money laundering by Citibank, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan. The net result was massive wealth transfers and the impoverishment of society which culminated in many deaths due to oppression and malnutrition.

here's part 1 to start you off...



i confess to having tears in my eyes as i watched this and felt the intense passion and anger of the people i've come to know and love holding forth for their country and what they believe in many of the same streets and plazas that i've walked myself...

(note: i've just watched the first 8 parts and i DARE you to watch them yourselves and not make the comparison to what is now happening in the G8 countries, particularly the uk and the u.s...)

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The myth of free trade and neoliberalism, special to "The Mustache of Understanding"

a somewhat lengthy but quite informative article in alternet via truthdig by chalmers johnson, reviewing Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, by cambridge economist ha-joon chang that, besides debunking neoliberal economic policies and the so-called "washington consensus," excoriates tom friedman...

[The] book is a discursive, well-written account of what [Chang] calls the "Bad Samaritan," "people in the rich countries who preach free markets and free trade to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's markets and preempt the emergence of possible competitors. They are saying 'do as we say, not as we did' and act as Bad Samaritans, taking advantage of others who are in trouble."

[...]

[Neoliberal policies include] privatizing state-owned enterprises, maintaining low inflation, shrinking the size of the state bureaucracy, balancing the national budget, liberalizing trade, deregulating foreign investment, making the currency freely convertible, reducing corruption, and privatizing pensions. It is called neoliberalism because of its acceptance of rich-country monopolies over intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, etc.), the granting to a country's central bank of a monopoly to issue bank notes, and its assertion that political democracy is conducive to economic growth, none of which were parts of classical liberalism.

chang's - and johnson's - bottom line...

[F]ree trade, privatization, and [neoliberal] policies are ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense...

[...]

It is time to recognize, particularly in the English-language economic press, that a "level playing field" leads to unfair competition when the players are unequal.

i spend a great deal of time outside the united states... i have worked on economic development projects in so-called "emerging economies," principally in former socialist countries, i reside part-time in argentina, i have traveled extensively throughout latin america, eastern and southeastern europe, and i have seen first-hand the devastation wreaked by neoliberal, world bank and imf policies... following those policies, it is virtually impossible for a country's producers and manufacturers to prosper... how could they when transnational corporations flood the national markets with goods and services, establish a country-wide presence, and operate with an economy of scale that home-grown businesses find it impossible to match...

every time i go to shop, i always look at the fine-print on the labels of the items i purchase because i want to see what corporation is behind the product... 9 times out of ten it is a transnational corporation, unilever, nestle, proctor and gamble, pepsico, coca cola, danone, bayer, etc., etc... sure, if the country is a big enough market, those corporations may license local companies to produce their products in-country which is at least somewhat better than importing everything, but the money still largely flows out of the country... and, if the market is small - macedonia, for instance - most brand-name products on store shelves are 100% imported... (and, yes, there are plenty of knock-offs, but that's a whole 'nother story...)

anyone who espouses free trade and neoliberal economic policies is either grossly ignorant of the realities those policies have created in the developing world or committed to serving his or her own economic interests at the expense of others...

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Just When I Think We Can't Go Lower

Courtesy of the AP.

NY Town Lets Seniors Work to Pay Taxes
By JIM FITZGERALD
GREENBURGH, N.Y. (AP) — Audrey Davison lives alone, gets a $620 Social Security check each month and worries about the sharply rising taxes on her four-bedroom house. Davison, 76, raised her family there and after 43 years, she really doesn't want to leave Greenburgh.

Greenburgh doesn't want her to leave, either.

The town is pushing a program that would let seniors work part-time, for $7 an hour, to help pay off some of their property taxes.

"People shouldn't have to sell their house, move away to a place with less taxes, leave behind their family and friends," said Town Supervisor Paul Feiner.

He envisions retired doctors mentoring schoolchildren, retired accountants helping with the town's finances, retired lawyers offering their services for a discount. But there are plenty of less-skilled jobs that need doing, he said.

"It's not like we're going to see grandma running the snowplow," he said. "There are lots of things people can do for the town and it wouldn't cost us that much to pay them."

The proposal has caused a stir in Greenburgh, a town of 90,000 in Westchester County(emphasis added), which has the nation's third-highest homeowner property taxes. The plan would be unusual if not unique in New York, but similar programs are considered successes in Colorado, Massachusetts, South Carolina and elsewhere.

Westchester County, by the way, is also home to the North East Elite, like our next President, Hitlery.

Davison, who suffers from arthritis and sciatica and needs a walker to get around on her bad days, said she pays about $12,000 a year in property taxes — perhaps $2,000 to the town — and has already taken out a reverse mortgage to pay her bills

.
What NeoCon, Fascist, power drunk asshole came up with this idea? I don't get along with my Mother, but she won't be working to pay her property taxes. What have we become when old folks are forced to work to pay their taxes? I guess it's not enough they have to work just to pay the electric bill. And while were at it, how about all their no account pre-teen grandchildren. I bet there are a lot of 8 inch sewer pipes they could inspect for 7 bucks an hour.

Talking to Feiner last week at the town senior center, she said, "I would work as long as it was a job where I could sit."

"You could be a receptionist!" Feiner said. "You could greet people right here, when they come in."
[...]

This guy Feiner is a true butthead. I bet he has a better paying receptionist job available for her, at the US embassy in Iraq. What an opportunity!
I can't believe in one of the richest counties on Earth the residents will actually allow this kind of thing to continue.
And by the way, I don't think much of the Associated Press for slanting the story as being such a triumph for Senior Citizens.

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Light Cast Into The Shadows From An Insider

Another great article from a financial industry insider, Ann Berg. Courtesy of the Information Clearing House.

Crackpot Realists and Permanent War

By Ann Berg

08/28/07 "Antiwar" -- -- While economic pundits point fingers at loose lending for the malodor in the housing market that is now filling the noses of financiers, they miss the primary cause: permanent war. Permanent war has caused the nation's institutions – political, social, and economic – to be organized into an impervious structure without which war could not be tolerated or financed.

Although 9/11 pushed the war machine into high gear, political centralization and the structuring of American society around war first gained a foothold during World War II. In 1956, five years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the ascendancy of the military-industrial complex (a phrase that originally included the word congressional), the anti-imperialist C. Wright Mills described the triad of power in his book The Power Elite. Stressing how the military entered the political and economic spheres only temporarily during the First World War, he related how modern warfare and its need for massive industrial capacity – along with support from the technological and scientific communities – propelled the military to new heights of influence. Wrote Mills:

"For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end. … The only seriously accepted plan for 'peace' is a fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States."
[...]

Please read the rest of the article at ICH. Also, take note of Ann Berg's credits. She is no outsider or extremist.
"The Power Elite", by Mills, is an outstanding read as well.
Bottom line, none of what is going on today is new. This has all been setup for decades, we were just too fat and happy to notice.
Now that the Elites have globalized their assets, they no longer need the US economy to sustain them. We may indeed be at the final stage of our economic imperialism, with financial ruin in the west just around the corner.
Or, we could just keep killing people and stealing their wealth.
I'm not comfortable with that, I have too many friends from those countries that we would potentially attack, just so we can prop up our economy.
The Republicans and Democrats must go. They have no shame and no respect for the Constitutional Republic.

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Making damn sure the poor stay poor

for reasons i cannot effectively articulate, jerome a paris over at daily kos often puts my nose out of joint, and so i usually make it a habit to NOT read his diaries... however, the title of this one caught my eye and i think it's well worth posting here...

The poor must remain poor

by Jerome a Paris [Subscribe]

Thu Aug 23, 2007 at 05:16:46 AM PDT

An excellent exchange between ThatBritGuy and someone in the Salon (the daily round up of international news and stories prepared by Fran over at the European Tribune) this morning, about the deal between Venezuela and London to provide subsidized transport to the poorer Londoners, and the outrage it generated:

Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, has struck a discounted fuel deal with London mayor Ken Livingstone in exchange for expertise on tourism and public transport in Caracas. The move will give up to a million Londoners living on benefits half-price fares on the city's buses.

But Livingstone's critics slammed the deal as "immoral", asking why one of the world's richest capitals should accept developing world subsidies.

Angie Bray, the London Assembly Conservative leader, said the mayor should have requested for financial help from the British treasury instead.

Which triggered this series of comments:

Right. 'Cause the tories are usually so happy to provide public funding for 'hand-outs to the poor'.

A blisteringly unappealing insight into the mind of the Right - not only do they not want to share their own wealth, they hate the idea of help for the poor, even when it's coming out of someone else's pocket.

Ah, but I am sure that they do see it as coming out of their own pocket. After all, the oil wealth which this program is based on has been wrongfully appropriated by an ugly, leftist government. It ought to go into the pockets of investors of oil majors

And there we have it all in a nutshell: neoliberalism is superior to all systems because it could afford to help its poor, and therefore does not need to actually do so. The potential it has, that unfulfilled promise, is, in itself, enough to make the system superior for all to all other modes of economic regulation. But of course, actually implementing that promise would weaken the magic wealth creation machine (mostly, it seems, because the poor would no longer be properly motivated to work hard) and should thus be avoided at all costs.

nothing like threatening the status quo of the super-rich power and money grabbers to elicit a strong response, eh...?

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